Americas

A Staten Island, New York, grand jury announced last week that it will
not indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the illegal chokehold
death of father of six and Staten Island resident, Eric Garner. This
stunning announcement comes on the heels of the explosive wave of
protest in Ferguson, and nationally, following the announcement that
police officer Darren Wilson wouldn’t face trial for the killing of 18
year old Michael Brown. It is clear that the racist capitalist system in
this country has a total disregard for the lives of working people, poor
people and particularly black and brown youth whose lives are deemed
disposable. Police kill black Americans at nearly the same rate as the
lynching during the Jim Crow era and young black men are 21 times more
likely to be shot dead by police than white men. The righteous
indignation of working people and youth protesting the grand jury
announcement last night is justified and must be escalated to end this
daily misery.

“A Gentle Human Being”

The friends and family of Eric Garner describe him as a gentle human
being. On July 17, he was approached by plainsclothes police officers as
he stood on a Staten Island street allegedly selling loose cigarettes.
He had had previous encounters with police over the same issue. This
time he declared he would not be harassed by the police anymore. Officer
Pantaleo applied a banned chokehold to Garner and continued to apply it
after he took Garner to the ground. Garner called out “I can’t breathe”.
Even after Panteleo released Garner, EMT personnel stood idly by and
allowed Garner to die at the scene. The events of this police killing
were recorded on film by Ramsey Orta, who was harassed by the police and
subsequently indicted on a weapons charge. Orta correctly stated the
charge was retribution by the police for his video and unwavering
support for the Garner family.

De Blasio, Bratton, Obama and the State

The website FiveThirtyEight.com states that “The FBI reports that in
2011, cops in America killed 404 suspects in acts of ‘justifiable
homicide’.” Astonishingly though this number likely doesn’t include
every civilian fatality that year since it relies on voluntary reporting
and doesn’t include police homicides that aren’t deemed “justifiable”.
Still, 404 is a huge number. By comparison, just six people were killed
by police in Australia over the same period. Police in England and Wales
killed only two people, and German police killed six. (http://www.businessinsider.com/why-do-us-police-kill-so-many-people-2014-8#ixzz3KttKriXu).

As a recent New York Times editorial pointed out, the scale of cop
harassment and killings shows why in many black communities, “the police
are justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous
with state-sponsored abuse.” (The Meaning of the Ferguson Riots, NY
Times editorial, 11/25/14) But while police brutality disproportionately
affects poor African American communities, hundreds of whites and
Latinos are also killed by the police on a yearly basis often in highly
dubious circumstances. No warning police raids and shoot to kill police
procedures are the norm across the US particularly in poor communities.

The Ferguson and Garner verdicts highlight the inability and
unwillingness of big business and its two parties (Democrats and
Republicans) to seriously address or even curtail the militarization of
the police and the systemic nature of police violence. The role of the
police under capitalism is first and foremost to defend the interests,
property and prestige of the ruling elite by any means. In general the
elite have seen the militarization of the police, on top of the
criminalization of large sections of black youth and mass incarceration,
as a key part of maintaining social control. Fear of crime is used to
divide the working class on racial lines while poor black communities
face a virtual police state. While some in the ruling class are raising
the need to scale down the war on drugs or introduce some reforms of the
police there are very serious limits to how far the ruling class as a
whole are prepared to go. For example, President Obama recently reviewed
the sale of military equipment to police departments and decided to make
no changes.

In New York City, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor a year ago partly
because of his promise to end the hated stop and frisk program. De
Blasio did indeed significantly scale back stop and frisk, an important
step forward, but at the same time he brought back former police
commissioner, William Bratton, the master mind behind the “broken
windows” and “quality of life” aggressive policing doctrine. It was the
policies and training of the NYPD and big business that led directly to
Garner’s death. It is not an aberration; the whole system is guilty.

The response by Bill de Blasio to the Garner decision was lukewarm and
sentimental and he did not openly condemn the decision as some local
elected officials did. Meanwhile President Obama’s White House summit
with many mayors following the events in Ferguson touted the allocation
of 260 million dollars for body cameras for officers and a national
commission to review the militarization of the police. Body cameras
would be a welcome reform but they would not have kept Eric Garner alive
given that officer Pantaleo knew he was being filmed. A deeper question
is what would it take to secure a successful conviction against a police
officer who killed someone given the enormously broad police “rules of
engagement”. The limitation of Obama’s commission is also shown by the
choice of Charles Ramsey as one of its co-chairs. Ramsey, former chief
of police in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, is known as an law and
order stalwart and defender of militarized policing.

The ruling class will not concede any weakening of overall police powers
without a major social struggle by the working class, particularly by
black and brown workers and youth. The labor movement must play an
active role in this struggle for racial and economic justice. Police
repression which targets black youth today will be used against workers’
struggles tomorrow as it has been repeatedly in the past in the US
against important strikes and battles for better wages and working
conditions.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never
will.”

Our movement is posed with a serious question of how to deal with police
accountability and control. Socialist Alternative calls for local
policing to be overseen by committees of democratically elected
representatives from the trade unions and the community. These
committees should have the power to hire, retrain and fire police
officers, and to shut down police stations known for corruption and
misconduct. This is a crucial tool to combat police violence as part of
challenging capitalism’s control over society. The attorney general Eric
Holder has announced a federal investigation of the Garner case. We have
little faith in this process. We must demand the overhauling of the role
of the grand juries and prosecutors in all these cases. Socialist
Alternative demands full independent investigations in Ferguson, Staten
Island and all other cases of police killings led by representatives of
affected communities and workers organizations with subpoena,
indictment, and prosecution powers.

The movement against police violence

The movement on the streets against police violence can become the
beginning of a new black freedom movement. Such a movement must also
take up the economic devastation which is being caused by capitalism. It
is under President Obama’s watch that black workers and youth are faced
with sharply rising levels of poverty and income inequality as well as
ongoing mass incarceration. In fact African Americans in the past six
years have experienced the biggest loss of wealth since the end of
slavery. The fight for a $15 minimum wage which has caught fire around
the US is a brilliant way to begin to build the broader working class
fightback which is essential to a successful fight against all forms of
oppression.

We must tear down the edifice of capitalism and racial oppression with
our own energy and ingenuity to reaffirm our humanity in the face of
state-sponsored violence and callous indifference by the ruling elite.
None of us can breathe in a system of economic, political and social
terrorism; the only medicine that can cure our ills is a system change.
The struggle for democratic socialism and workers democracy must be
placed on agenda.

Socialist Alternative Demands

• The indictment of officer Daniel Pantaleo.

• End the system of closed grand juries. For fully independent
investigations in all cases of police killings.

• Elected civilian review boards in all cities with the power of hiring
and firing as a step towards community control of the police.

• An end to the militarization of the police! For the millions spent on
new police weaponry to be invested in schools, health care, housing and
public works.